Arts and Letters

Ten months ago in his native Missouri he died, literally with his boots on. After dinner Tom Benton walked into his studio to look at a mural he had just painted for a country music group in Tennessee. His wife Rita later found him on the studio floor—the eighty-five- year-old heart had finally stopped beating.

A flood of drawings and book illustrations, more than a hundred editions of lithographs, ceaseless painting at his easel and on walls throughout a professional career spanning sixty-eight years produced a body of work unique among his contemporaries. Art reference books keep Thomas Benton in triumvirate harness with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, but for sheer energy of form, for an enormous output, and for an innate rebellion of spirit he was alone in his own category.

Although he was surely not an art rebel in the avant-garde sense he was constitutionally at odds with the establishment. This stance was not limited to his opinion of art critics or of those he called the museum pretty boys. For example, in a mural for the Missouri State Capitol, his fire was aimed at a well-known political boss trafficking freely with people of his city. The ensuing controversy in no way stopped him, in another mural painted for the Indiana Building at the Chicago World's Fair, from depicting Ku Klux Klan activity. He was, in this respect, like his namesake granduncle Thomas Hart Benton, the fiery orator who was Missouri's first United States senator.

As a teenager Benton went to Paris for a couple of years. His dabbling with European modernisms was just that and he abandoned the practice early in his career. It was written, and I quote, that "Thomas Benton's was the strongest voice among those regionalist artists who arose in reaction against European estheticism. Of them all he was the one who dug deepest into the grass roots and, to our relief, declared most dramatically that they were still strong and healthy. And any art critic who could not quite string along with this school of reactionary narrative realism could always point out that Thomas Benton had Americanized the forms of El Greco."

He and I were gallery stablemates and I knew him as a man ornery in speech and warm of heart. On one occasion in an art agent's office he listened to the conversation between the agent and me about a series of drawings that had been requested. Tom's only comment was some brief advice: "Joe, let them tell you what they want but don't let them tell you what to do."

His tendency to side with the artists did little to mitigate a prejudice against his work among many contemporary painters. Thomas Benton was seventy-three before he was nominated for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The liberals castigated Benton for the jingoist side of his patriotism, the internationalists mocked his narrow Midwest regionalism, the purists of formalism looked down on his pictorial narrations. His canvases have been scorned for their lack of subtlety in theme or design or color, and his paint surface is, admittedly, not what could be called voluptuous. As Edward Hopper said of his own work, Tom Benton never took the time to be esthetic. The theatrical bombast and the overt muscularity of the man's work seems not the kind of poetry that our culture wants or, until recently, would acknowledge as important.

Yet, in defiance of the bulldozer force of fashion, Thomas Benton's art remains. It is there, stubbornly and inescapably. Its influence is visible in scores of murals in our country sponsored by the Federal Arts program forty years ago. His reputation as a powerhouse of Americana in paint has spread far outside the encapsulated art world. When I lived in France Thomas Benton was the best known American artist in that country. Today their number one Yankee artist appears to be Alexander Calder. With regard to Thomas Benton's art, critical approval or condemnation is becoming less relevant because his work grows more undeniable as a rich ingredient in our heritage.

Rita Benton had a lucid view of her husband. When once Tom Benton said of critics, "I furnish the stuff for them—the stuff for them to damn me," a friend asked him what made him so mean. He said someone else had asked him that very same question. "You're not mean, Tom," Mrs. Benton interjected. "You're vulgar, but you're not mean."

No. He could not be mean and have painted the love of life, of the life in this country, with which his mural paintings sing. Their music is frankly fortissimo. Thomas Benton's voice is very much a part of our national chorus that was heard and will be heard.